


watch you breathing, watch you breathing out

by bumblegremlin



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Jack Zimmermann's Overdose, Overdose, Suicide mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:08:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28885872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bumblegremlin/pseuds/bumblegremlin
Summary: Prepared to embarrass him if he didn’t hear her, or scold him if he did and was ignoring his mother, Alicia raps a warning on the bathroom door one more time and opens it.Jack isn’t in the shower. He isn’t brushing his teeth.Her teenage son is crumpled in a heap on the floor, an arm outstretched.
Relationships: Alicia Zimmermann & Bob Zimmermann & Jack Zimmermann, Alicia Zimmermann/Bob Zimmermann
Comments: 4
Kudos: 47





	watch you breathing, watch you breathing out

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, guys!
> 
> First of all, I am proud of this fic, but it is not a happy one. It is Jack's OD and its immediate aftermath from Bob and Alicia's point of view, since I was thinking about how it was probably one of them who found him. So, goes without saying, trigger warning for depictions of overdosing and mentions of suicide (which isn't what happens but still). 
> 
> The characters speak in French throughout this fic, but it's not necessary to understand that to follow what's going on. Translations are in the end notes.
> 
> Technically there is more to this, so it might become a series, but no promises.

“Jack?” Alicia knocks on the door of the bathroom. “Jack, tu vas prendre une douche maintenant? J'allais préparer le dîner.” 

There’s no response from inside. She listens to see if water’s running and he’s already in the shower, but she doesn’t hear anything. 

“Jack, si t'as faim, on peut manger maintenant. Ou on peut attendre, si tu veux. Ça me dérange pas.”

She knocks again. It’s late in the day for him to be getting ready, but she knows he was up late the night before, talking with his dad about the draft. Oh, the draft. That’s been the only topic of conversation in this household for weeks, and Alicia is ready to put some food on the table and request their family talk about something else, just for today. The way Jack was just stumbling around in the kitchen a few minutes ago, like he was in a trance, Alicia thinks he could use it.

But Alicia’s not going to put cold food on the table, so if he wants lunch now or later, he’s going to have to let her know.

Prepared to embarrass him if he didn’t hear her, or scold him if he did and was ignoring his mother, Alicia raps a warning on the door one more time and opens it.

Jack isn’t in the shower. He isn’t brushing his teeth.

Her teenage son is crumpled in a heap on the floor, an arm outstretched.

“Jack!” Alicia cries out, and rushes forward, pulling him onto her lap on the tile floor. He doesn’t respond. He’s completely limp, and though his chest is moving with slow, small breaths and his eyes are open in a hazy stare, he is gone to the world.

Panicked, Alicia pats every pocket on her person for her cellphone before she realizes that she doesn’t have it. It’s charging in the living room downstairs, and the closest house phone is in her bedroom, which she could run and grab but that would mean she would have to let go of Jack, and Alicia can’t do that right now, she just can’t-

“Bob!” she shouts, and the sound is ripped out of her, loud and frenzied. She hears it like it’s someone else’s voice. “Bobby!”

She hears footsteps running up the stairs, and in the time before her husband gets there she looks back down at her son’s face. It’s slack like he’s sleeping, but he’s not, he’s alive, but he’s unconscious and - Jack’s head lilts an unnatural way in her lap when Alicia is jolted by Bob appearing in the doorway.

 _Appearing_ is too gentle a word. He’s braced against the doorframe, using it to force his run to a stop, because he heard Alicia screaming and booked it. She sees him adjust and take in what’s in front of him, and watches the terror appear in his eyes. 

“Jack-” he says, strangled. Then, he’s kneeling at her side, his hands on their son’s shoulders. “Est-il-”

He’s asking if he’s alive. “Il respire,” Alicia promises. That’s all she’s paying attention to. He’s breathing. He has a pulse. “You need to get a phone. You need to call-”

Bob looks at her with wide eyes, but he doesn’t waste any time. He’s back out of the room and down the hall and grabbing their bedroom phone, and by the time he’s standing in the entrance to the bathroom again, he’s already dialled 911. The operator is asking him for information on the emergency, and Bob is trying to describe the scene in front of him, their son on the floor, unconscious. He keeps looking to Alicia for answers, like the twenty seconds she had before Bob got there were enough to explain anything.

And then, while Bob is still speaking, Alicia scans the room again and spies the object rolling on the floor by her ankle. 

She gasps, “Bob,” and holds it up so that her husband can see the pill bottle, empty but for a handful of capsules inside and what’s fallen out by the sink.

He stops speaking mid sentence, and in his eyes she sees what she already knows.

They’d only refilled that bottle two weeks ago.

-

They go in the ambulance with Jack, and they bring the pill bottle with them.

They’re told that there’s a procedure, medication, to try and reverse the effects of the drugs. Someone asks Alicia if she knows how much he took, and she has to say that she doesn’t know. She has no idea. It is made very clear to her that with the kind of medication he consumed, there is a time pressure. They might be saying that as a comfort that she found him when she did, Alicia doesn’t know. All she can think about is what would have happened if she hadn’t gone upstairs when she did. She pictures Jack’s eyes empty instead of dazed and unfocused, and has to stifle a sob. Bobby’s hand is on her knee. To think she had only gone looking for him to ask about _lunch-_

Alicia spends every second from when she opened the bathroom door to the completion of the revival attempts feeling unable to breathe. Air only really enters her lungs when the doctor tells her Jack responded well. He’ll make it. He’ll be okay.

The relief only lasts as long as it takes for her to process what had happened.

Jack had overdosed.

A nurse asks her if she needs directions to somewhere she can go to eat. Alicia is starving. She couldn’t eat a crumb without bringing it up right now. She takes one look at Bobby’s face, which is closed off, and knows the offer is more of an encouragement to get out of the waiting area that is thick with horrible suspense.

“Non, merci,” she says. “J’veux être ici quand il se réveille."

The nurse accepts the answer and leaves them alone. Before she goes, she looks at Bobby, despite the fact that he hadn’t even acknowledged her presence.

The second the woman is gone, the tears Alicia had been holding back fill her eyes again. Her hand is against her mouth, but it isn’t enough to keep the words that have been eating away at her from coming out.

“Penses-tu,” she breathes shakily, “qu’il essayait-”

She can’t finish the sentence, but it doesn’t matter. Bob is already answering the question.

“Non,” he says, firm. “Non. C’est pas Jack. Non.” His conviction that their son wouldn’t try to take his own life is almost comforting, but his reassurance falters into an exhaled prayer, “J’éspère que non.”

His quiet suffering pushes her over the edge. She thinks of the doctor holding the pill bottle, and after a series of questions, telling Bob and Alicia that based on Jack’s current condition, the fact that he was alive, what he’d consumed hadn’t been enough to kill someone his size, but it should have been. Based on the prescription and how much had been left behind, what was in that bottle should have killed him, if the math was put into play.

Bob asked what he meant.

The doctor looked at the two of them, and he didn’t do a very good job of hiding his pity. 

It meant that there had been less in the bottle than the prescription noted that there should have been at the time. It meant that Jack had likely been taking more than he should have, regularly, and probably had been for some time.

It meant that Jack had a drug problem and neither Bob or Alicia had seen it.

What kind of parents _are_ they?

“I should have been paying better attention,” Alicia says in English, through her tears. 

Bobby puts his hand on her arm and makes her look at him. He hasn’t cracked, but his eyes are red. “No. Alicia, no. This isn’t your fault.”

“He’s only eighteen,” she sobs.

Her mind goes wild with the same thoughts she’s been having since speaking to the doctor. This had been going on for some time. Since when? When had Alicia needed to look closer at her son and see what he was going through and failed to do that? When had she needed to put a stop to this and not done it?

God, he’d always been so hard on himself. 

The same glow in the dark hockey players he’d put on his ceiling when he was eight years old, laughing and smiling, were the ones he stared up at when he couldn’t sleep. The rec centre in Brossard had a picture of him with his minor league team on the wall, grinning and full of joy. But it was on that same ice that he lapped with his Dad for fun as a kid that he stepped off, looking absolutely crushed after losing a game. Not a tournament. Just a _game,_ and he’d looked like a puppet with all its strings cut. When she’d seen his face like that, that time he’d been outscored by some boys from Halifax when he was fifteen, it hadn’t been the first time. But maybe it had been the start of something, hadn’t it?

Because that was the game that had made him put his face in his hands in the car afterwards, his breathing a shaky, awful thing that wouldn’t even out.

That was when talking to Alicia, and talking to Bob, had turned into talking to a doctor. 

That was when talking to medical professionals turned into a prescription, which was supposed to help him cope, which seemed to be working, which tricked Bob and Alicia into thinking Jack’s anxiety was something that could be handled and that their son was okay until-

He wasn’t.

 _“Crisse,”_ Bob swears. 

Alicia folds herself into his arms and lets her tears dampen his shirt. The two of them stand in the hospital room, holding each other, and gather their strength for when their son wakes up. For whatever is going to happen next.

**Author's Note:**

> French translations:  
> “Jack, tu vas prendre une douche maintenant? J'allais préparer le dîner.” = “Jack, are you going to take a shower now? I was going to make lunch.”  
> “Jack, si tu as faim, on peut manger maintenant. Ou on peut attendre, si tu veux. Ça ne me dérange pas.” = “Jack, if you’re hungry, we can eat now. Or we can wait, if you want. It doesn’t bother me.”  
> “Il respire.” = “He’s breathing.”  
> “Non, merci. J’veux être ici quand il se réveille." = “No, thank you. I want to be here when he wakes up.”  
> “Penses-tu qu’il essayait-” = “Do you think he was trying-”  
> “Non. Non. C’est pas Jack. Non... J’éspère que non.” = “No. No. That’s not Jack. No.... I hope not.”


End file.
